2. Field of the Disclosure
There are various manners in which people rendezvous outdoors, at event sites, and so forth. A conventional typical form of rendezvous is such wherein people decide on a rendezvous time and place using letters, phone, or the like beforehand, and the people travel to this place in accordance with the time thereof.
However, with such a manner of rendezvous, there has been a problem in that, in the event that delay due to some sort of hindrance has occurred, or there has been a mistake regarding the location, or the like, meeting up with a partner at scheduled time and place is difficult. For example, there has been inconsistency in arrival time at a rendezvous place due to traffic conditions. Also, in the event of many people existing at a rendezvous place, it may be difficult for people walking while looking for a partner to notice the presence of each other.
Though it can be conceived that the people might come closer to each other by communicating using cellular phones, it is not necessarily easy for the people to accurately orally inform the partner of the current locations of each other or rendezvous location, or to recognize these.
On the other hand, there have been proposed various services taking advantage of multifunction cellular phone terminals called as smartphones which have come into widespread use in recent years. In general, various sensors for measuring the state of a terminal or user are mounted on multifunction cellular phone terminals, such as a GPS (Global Positioning System) for obtaining the current location, a geomagnetic sensor for detecting a tilt (direction) as to the terrestrial magnetism of a terminal, and so forth.
In association with the problems such as the above, with Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-227168 (PTL 1) for example, there has been proposed a system which takes advantage of location information according to the GPS functions of personal digital assistants which the users possess to reorient or inform the optimal rendezvous place in real time, thereby performing assistance for rendezvous.
Also, with Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2008-22491 (PTL 2), there has been proposed a system which has applied a method wherein of two wireless devices which can communicate with each other, one of the wireless devices (master terminal device) confirms the existence of the other wireless device (slave terminal device), to detection of a missing child. More specifically, a slave terminal device which a child possesses receives the request signal from the master terminal device which a parent possesses, and estimates distance as to the master terminal device according to the received signal strength. The slave terminal device determines the child to be “absent” in the event that the estimated distance is longer than a threshold, and responds to the master terminal device in that effect. The mater terminal device which received this response generates a warning beep.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2010-250783 (PTL 3) discloses a technique wherein the current location of a pet is propagated to a cellular phone terminal using a GPS function to display a map including the current location thereof on the display screen.